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" My worst and best qualities are rashness: the good part of it is due to youth, which is, of course, why I'm not a great conductor. "

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" I was a harpsichordist in my teens, and there was a bunch of us in Liverpool who got together every week to play Bach. "

" You would never train people to play football by telling them to watch football. You make them play football. "

" Conducting 'Tristan' is like floating in amniotic fluid, but having worked on it for three months, I now know why people who go near it go so strange. "

" The jazz records come out a lot. You find that with many musicians - we don't listen to our own music for relaxation. "

" The music lovers of London and the country deserve to have something where orchestras can flourish. You have no idea how wonderful an orchestra like the London Symphony Orchestra can sound in a great concert hall. "

" Nobody has Francis Bacon on their walls in their house - or very few people - but sometimes people listen to Beethoven as though it was background and a comfort, and I think that is very dangerous. "

" I first heard Mahler's second symphony aged 11 in Liverpool, and it inspired me to become a conductor. "

" Passionate musicians only come from passionate five-year-olds. "

" Some of my favorite music in the world is Haydn. I had a sabbatical one year and made myself one promise: to play a different Haydn piano sonata each day - they are inexhaustible treasures. "

" I believe if you're not completely in love with what you're doing, you'd better find another profession. "

" Every orchestra has its own sound. "

" We have to be evangelists for music. We couldn't just be high priests of music. "

" In my mid-twenties, I was with a conducting career, but I had never been to university and I wanted to. There were things I wanted to study in depth. I also wanted to see if I could survive without music. "

" Yes, I was a weird duck, no doubt. "

" The better the orchestra, often the harder it is to conduct, not the other way around. "

" Always the journey, never the destination. "

" I love Mozart, but I often make a terrible hash of it. "

" One of the most difficult things in opera is for people to suspend disbelief. "

Difficult Things

" Beethoven was always too much. He's not slightly anything - he's very everything. "

" I'd be much more likely to watch the latest Tarantino movie than to listen to a Mahler symphony. "

" What really counts isn't whether your instrument is Baroque or modern: it's your mindset. "

" The necessity for rules and strictness is a way of dealing with an enormously powerful impulse: Germans are among the most emotional people on the planet. Maybe it has to do with the fact that, as a nation, they are always drawn back to nature and the forest. "

" There is a mysterious way in which orchestras keep a sense of their history and what they've done. I still listen to the L.A. Philharmonic and feel that Giulini was there. "

" Sometimes, musicians worry too much about how beautifully they are playing. "

" One of the most extraordinary and all-encompassing forms of communication is music. It reaches places that all kinds of other things cannot reach. I'll put my cards on the table: I think it is our greatest language. "

" I've always had a profound conviction that great music is about joy, even in the face of tragedy. "

" As a nation, we English tend to be self-deprecating, looking down on ourselves. We're insular but also flexible, whereas in Germany, it's a case of besser wissen - we know better. That's very Deutsch. People are never frightened to tell you what you're doing wrong, in a way that would never happen in England. "

" Germans have an understanding of history and cannot allow themselves to forget it. It may be a curse, but in some ways, it's a blessing. It makes them cautious. "

" My only interest is in sharing great music with more and more people. "

" Conductors start getting good when everybody else retires. "